IGN: A lot of the BioWare "flavor" is that you give choices. You make the player take the good side or the bad side or somewhere in the grey area, but it's always about making choices. How are those choices going to play into how the story is told and how the game plays?

Casey Hudson: You may have seen how we have a new interface for interacting with characters in the world. So it's based on a circular wheel that represents different directions for emotional responses. The neat thing about this is that when you interact with another character, you're able to do things that you can't normally do if it is just conversation or just picking dialogue options. So here, you can see the whole spectrum from something that is a simple verbal response to taking a fairly extreme action or making an important decision.

But you can do these things almost instantaneously because you start to learn how to react through the system. It's really amazing how fast you learn it and then how much value it has in being able to instantly react to somebody. Your action might be as extreme as hitting them with the butt of your rifle and then when they're on the ground you tell them how things are going to go. It can be very extreme.

Those interactions that have a much more visceral and tangible flavor to them, that's where you start to have an experience that immerses you inside the story in a way that we were never able to do before.

IGN: Yeah, the conversation wheel is really cool and I think it will add a lot to the RPG experience. But one thing that we've always had a pet peeve with in RPGs is the situation where you walk into a bar and there are 10 people there. Nine of them will give you a generic response and then one will have a real conversation with you. Are you doing anything to alleviate that and make the world feel more real?

Casey Hudson:Yeah. One thing we've done all throughout the experience is kind of like sanding off the edges, if you think about it that way. Maybe in a previous role-playing game you've got one piece of the puzzle which is the person that stands there and only has the one line to give you. Then you have the character that pulls you into the conversation that you've got to do. Then you've got another thing that pulls you into a cinematic.

But what we've done with Mass Effect is taken steps so that each of these things is more fluid with the other things around it. So, for example, before we would have had characters in your squad that, when they talk to you, you're in full conversation mode. But actually a lot of the conversation with your other squad members takes place outside of any sort of cutscene or dialog interface and they're really just talking to you as you're walking around. They're commenting on the world and other characters are talking to them and vice versa. So when you come across a room full of characters, they're all talking and maybe commenting on you and your squad is commenting on them. Everyone is doing their own thing to a degree where it is a lot harder to tell what characters are capable of what.

There are a lot of conventions that we're trying to avoid. Like, you're running through an open area but up ahead you can see a character that looks like their purpose in life is that they will stop you and talk to you when you get close. After you play a few games like that it starts to drive you nuts because you see that character and you think, oh I'm not ready to have a conversation with that character yet. Whereas in Mass Effect, you can run past that character and they may call out to you with something that entices you to go over and talk to them. But we avoid having that character pull you into a conversation without you being able to just run past it. We want to make everything a result of decisions that you've made. Even if you're talking to a character about something, we always give you an out so you can say, "Alright, that's enough. Talk to you later."

IGN: You just spoke a bit about inter-party interactions. One of the things we've always been looking for in a game like this is seeing the party really develop. In Knights of the Old Republic, you could be the most terrible person in the entire world and yet the good people in your squad would just follow you blindly. But we saw in one of the Mass Effect videos released an actual argument between a couple people in the party. Are decisions you make going to splinter your party and maybe build on themselves?

Casey Hudson: Yeah, it definitely will. And that is one of the fun things about giving you a squad where each of the characters has very different motivations. Therefore, you can imagine when we give you really opposite characters, having both of those characters in your squad or seeing how they respond to the things you're doing. We can throw those things in there and allow things to develop and react, but as a player it becomes clear why having certain characters in your squad or taking certain kinds of actions in the world start to really matter.

That is one of the things we were able to see in the X06 demo. As you're doing things, you may have people in your squad that disagree with you. But there may be someone else in your squad that disagrees with them. That's another thing that we do take to extremes where at some point it actually becomes potentially a fight to the death on issues that matter enough. That's one of the cool things about having a storyline that is really emotionally charged and on a big scale. If you're ready to go to extremes to smash down any barrier that 's in your way, the way you go about that could go against the way some of your squad members would like to see. It's something that draws out the importance of your choices in the game.

IGN: Now will we see any of this topple over into the actual gameplay, or is that all going to be story related? If maybe two of my characters aren't getting along, will that affect the way they fight in a battle?

Casey Hudson: If you end up getting in a fight with your squad members, it'll be something that you will actually play out. But generally their ability in combat, it's kind of in line with the idea that they'll voice their opinion and may object and argue with you, but when you tell them to execute then ultimately you are their commander and they will follow you until they try to bail out or fight you.

IGN: Since we're moving over to the gameplay side of things, how open is the game progression? In the beginning when we get our spaceship are we going to be able to travel around to any planet and attack things the way we see fit or is this going to be a linear experience?

Casey Hudson: No, it's an extremely nonlinear game. The idea is that we start off with a prologue that is the major eye opening hook for what is happening in the universe of Mass Effect. Once you've played through the prologue, you show up on the starship in command of it and you've really got the run of the whole galaxy. At that point it is about trying to uncover new locations to go to and new leads on what is going on.